Beiko, Brandt land Aurora nominations

Winnipeg writers Gerald Brandt and S.M. Beiko are in the running for Canada’s science fiction and fantasy awards, the Auroras.

Brandt is nominated in the adult novel category for The Rebel, the third book in his San Angeles cyberpunk series. Beiko is nominated in the young-adult novel category for Scion of the Fox, the first book in her Realms of Ancient series.

The Auroras are voted on by members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. Voting begins today and the winner will be announced in October.

Winnipeg writers Gerald Brandt and S.M. Beiko are in the running for Canada’s science fiction and fantasy awards, the Auroras.

Brandt is nominated in the adult novel category for The Rebel, the third book in his San Angeles cyberpunk series. Beiko is nominated in the young-adult novel category for Scion of the Fox, the first book in her Realms of Ancient series.

The Auroras are voted on by members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. Voting begins today and the winner will be announced in October.

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Twenty years after her debut novel The Tracey Fragments, which she adapted into a 2007 film starring Ellen Page, Maureen Medved is back with her second novel, Black Star.

In her new novel Medved, who teaches screen and fiction writing at the University of British Columbia, tells a story of power, sexual exploitation and manipulation in the academic world.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, news of the print book’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

Publishers Weekly, quoting the data source NPD Bookscan, reports that sales of print books in the U.S. increased two per cent in the first half of 2018 compared to the first half of 2017, which was itself a three per cent increase over the same period in 2016.

Driving the increase is a four per cent increase in adult non-fiction sales. Two big titles about current American politics contributed to the sales boost — Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty.

Though adult fiction sales were down, a few highly successful titles stand out, including the reissued The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which has sold more 325,000 copies in this U.S. this year, buoyed by the current television adaptation and the equally grim mood of the nation.

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The Winnipeg International Writers Festival wants to scare the daylights out of four Winnipeg writers this fall.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the festival will pay homage to the writing challenge that inspired it. The festival will select four Winnipeg writers to spend the night writing original scary stories in the allegedly haunted attic of the historic Dalnavert house on Sept. 21. Participants will then polish them prior to a reading on Halloween.

The challenge pays tribute to the most famous writers’ game in literary history. Shelley, her husband Percy and their friends Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori challenged each other to come up with scary stories while on holiday near Lake Geneva. The results included Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, the first published modern vampire story.

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A buzzed-about young-adult fantasy novel that mixes an exploration of racial and cultural divisions with a plot about magic and power is the first book selected by the new Tonight Show book club.

Host Jimmy Fallon recently announced the selection of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, and will lead the show’s reading of the book over the summer. The show will donate 3,000 copies to First Book, a non-profit organization dedicated to giving books to those who can’t afford them.

Adeyemi already has a sequel in the works. Children of Virtue and Vengeance will be published next fall.

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A librarian in William Shakespeare’s birthplace has found a brand-new literary genre.

The Stratford librarian discovered that when patrons check out books, the print-out lists book titles (without the author’s name) vertically in a manner that allows for accidental poetry when a patron checks out several books.

Since then, other libraries in Warwickshire have taken up the challenge by inviting patrons to create book-title print-out poems, including “When I wake up / The laughing monsters / Eat happy / Bone by bone.”